The woke are remarkably quiet on the Tax report for two important reasons.
1 – Since the death of Bruce Jesson, the majority of the NZ Left wing intelligentsia (with the bold exceptions of Professor Jane Kelsey, Dr Wayne Hope and Professor Susan St John) have capitulated to free market capitalism and Left wing activism has in turn become identity focused rather than class focused and as such simply don’t have the intellectual muscle required to challenge neoliberal economic hegemony.
The woke are great at organising a ‘free-the-nipple’ rally for militant vegan queer ally mommy bloggers, not so good at taxing then rich.
2 – The second reason the woke be so quiet is because of course they are all middle class and have one foot on the property ladder and want all the privileges that come with owning land. It’s similar to their militant defence of migrants, the woke have transferable global skill sets so any restriction on migrants is a restriction on their interests as well.
The woke are great at the low hanging fruit of identity politics because the solution is always exclusion of those who don’t accept identity politics dogma, but they are very quiet when it comes to class warfare in the form of a rigged capitalism because they themselves want to benefit from that rigged capitalism.
Watching the remarkable push back from the lobbyists the rich have put out to talk down any tax justice against them has reminded us class is the fundamental fault line in NZ and identity politics are simply a distraction!
There’s a class war in NZ but we don’t have the political vocabulary to articulate it because identity politics and not class is the only lens the middle class activists want to view society through!
Identity Politics simply cements into place a caste system of intersectionism alongside a terminal tribal affiliation to your skin colour, gender or identity.
There needs to be far more common ground and shared values.
The minefield of social justice and its never ending pure temple deplatforming of everything that triggers it will only drive people further from the Left in an intense economic downturn because you can’t eat virtue signalling aesthetics.
If you think the worst inflation in 30 years is bad now, wait until the impact of the Ukrainian war and broken supply chains in China hit.
We need a new taxation and regulation model to stop the neoliberal rot. We need to remove the yoke of taxation from the 90% and reset it to the 10% richest.
In 2010, the 388 richest individuals owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth
By 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 individuals
In 2018, it was 42
In 2019, it was down to only 26 individuals who own more wealth than 3.8 billion people.
And in 2021, 20 people owned more than 50% of the entire planet.
The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger and insecurities through social media in a way that has led to the largest psychological civil war ever launched against one another.
Meanwhile, the planet burns and every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.
This isn’t progress.
Unfortunately the Left are culturally too busy micro aggression policing everyone under the rules of the new woke dogma while the Right are silently harvesting that alienation for more neoliberal exploitation.
A Left Yin and Right Yang of petty spite and broad malice locked in a death spiral on a melting planet.
We either attack the economic settings of this madness now and fight to retain our egalitarianism or we are doomed to live in the shadow of its greed.
We need to be kinder to individuals and crueller to corporations.
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To illustrate part of Martyn’s point…those that should be leading the revolt against Rogernomics, Ruthanasia, and monetarist orthodoxy include central Labour organisation the NZCTU. But who fronted the media for the CTU after the release of the rich bastard exposing Tax Report?–the Secretary Melissa Ansell Bridges, President Richard Wagstaff? no it was their wimpish economist Mr Craig Rennie ducking and diving on RNZ, “well a capital gains tax is a simplistic answer, we need to look at a number of settings” he simpered on. Union leaders should be saying “this is war! are you with us, fight for economic justice now…”
Rennie worked most recently for the Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson as his Senior Economic Advisor for five years and worked at The Reserve Bank, Treasury, and the Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE),”
So workers of Aotearoa New Zealand if you are looking for fighting class left leadership you will need to rebuild the CTU from the ground up.
Even right wing pundits are essentially saying–“right you have caught the richos with their pants down–but–is Labour going to act…and the answer is no unless there is fightback.
Really good point TM.
Where’s the ‘union movement’? Is there even one? Insipid union leadership, incapable of challenging neo-liberalism, privatisation, and reduction of public and state services.
There are still over 300,000 union members, and many regularly fight hard for their employment agreements and in their industries. The problem is there is little combined action across the sectors and a lack of political oomph from the very body (NZCTU) that should be leading the working class.
I’ve been saying for a long time that underneath woke politics you often find class politics – or more accurately, class hatred.
In the last 2 decades effective activists never indulged in hating on people but if you were on the left you weren’t allowed to hate along lines of race, gender or orientation so that only really left “white trash” to direct your hatred toward. Fast forward to now and its working class men who have found themselves on the front lines of a culture war – hated by educated types and exploited by right wing politicians.
Around the time the Labour Party was changing into a Liberal Party the left also moved away from it’s focus on economic justice for working class people. I don’t think we should call identity politics left wing any more. It’s certainly liberal but it has nothing to do with economic justice.
What I’m looking for are the signs of a movement that is going to bring economic and ecological justice. And while it’s normal to focus on the people doing the hating I think we might be better off try to stop woke madness and just get on with organising the revolution.
Class trumps race every time, woke too.
JeezMartyn. Stop using the wordk ‘woke. You overuse it. People I know see that word from you and immediately stop reading.You produce some good stuff but for chrisakes think of a better word than woke.It’s done it’s time.
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